


red & blue jeans

by betty_noire



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bisexual Lance (Voltron), Bisexual Male Character, Bisexuality, Cuban Lance (Voltron), Galaxy Garrison, Gay Keith (Voltron), High School, JuLance Challenge 2018, Lance (Voltron)-centric, M/M, Misunderstandings, Online Dating, Pining Keith (Voltron), Slow Burn, Socially Awkward Keith (Voltron), Trans Female Pidge | Katie Holt, everyone says the fuck word a lot, kind of, male pronouns for Pidge in the beginning because Lance doesn't know
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-07-04
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-05 00:20:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 20,546
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15158351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/betty_noire/pseuds/betty_noire
Summary: Lance's hard work is finally paying off. He finally reached the top spot in the Galaxy Garrison’s flight program, which has been his goal for as long as he can remember. His rising star comes at the cost of his privacy, though. Now that he's the top pilot, everyone wants a piece of him. He just wants a chance to explore his bisexuality in peace.Keith has been plotting ways to break back into the Galaxy Garrison ever since he was expelled a few months ago, but so far nothing’s panning out. This is his last resort, and it has to be his dumbest plan yet.This is a reimagining of the first episode where Keith and Lance meet when they match with each other on Tinder.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> EDIT AGAIN: Images are fixed :)))))))
> 
>  
> 
> Title is from a promise ring song because I'm going for some SERIOUS school vibes in this one :)

Technically, Lance is pretty sure, under the Galaxy Garrison’s official student code of conduct, student use of dating apps while on campus is strictly forbidden. He’s only _pretty_ sure, because he hasn’t bothered to check. 

He’s always been more of a what-they-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-them and it’s-better-to-ask-forgiveness-than-permission sort of guy, and besides, he thinks these are extenuating circumstances. It isn’t like he’s breaking the rules without a reason, it’s not like he _needs_ to go online to get a date, it’s just that the dating pool at the Garrison is…small. The whole school is small, and Lance has been getting a lot of attention recently ever since he got moved up to Fighter Class. 

It feels like being under a microscope some days, and even though Lance has only dated three girls in his life, only kissed two, and only gotten past second base with one, he's somehow ended up with a school-wide reputation of being a player. He doesn't know what it is about him that gives off that impression, if its because of his middle child syndrome and his constant need to be the center of attention that gets him in trouble more often than not, or the fact that he puts more effort into his appearance than most of the guys he knows, or if it's just casual old fashion racism making it difficult for his classmates to conceptualize a latino boy from Cuba like Lance rising to the top without also spreading rumors that he's _constantly_ getting laid. All he knows for sure is that if he so much as winks at a fellow cadet on a Friday night, the whole school has heard about it by Saturday morning. Lance just wants a chance to meet someone and maybe flirt for a bit without worrying what people are going to start saying about him.

Also because he wants to try flirting with a boy.

It’s something he’s been thinking about for a couple of months now, so he’s pretty sure it’s the real deal, but he figures it’d be better to have some practical experience before he makes any kind of announcement. A couple of guys in the Garrison GSA are pretty cool, but Lance doesn’t want to experiment with someone he’s going to have to see regularly for the next three years if he turns out to be bisexual only in theory rather than in practice. 

So Lance made himself a tinder. He decided on that one because it’s open to all sexual orientations, and based on what his classmates already think of him, no one’s going to bat an eye if they see the telltale icon on his phone. He’ll be fine as long as he doesn’t check it in public, and since it’s almost definitely against the rules, the fact that he’s keeping it on the down low probably won’t draw any undue attention either. 

And that’s what brings him to where he is now, faking a stomach ache in the middle of his physics of flight lecture, locked in the last men’s room stall on the third floor of the aviation building, swiping right on a bunch of dudes.

Lance sits with his knees pulled up to his chest, feet resting on the toilet seat in the hopes that if anyone comes to use the restroom in the next little while, he’ll be hidden. He taps through to the profile of a 23 year old blonde fireman named Christian that he matched with this morning, mouth a little dry. The third photo of the guy is the typical shirtless-in-the-bathroom fare Lance knows he should be getting used to, but still make him light headed. It’s knowing that he’s _supposed_ to be looking, that if he plays his cards right he could be doing way more than just looking as soon as _this weekend_ that has him practically vibrating.

Lance is so bi it’s stupid. Part of him is practically embarrassed that it took him as long as it did to figure it out, but mostly he’s just happy to know. A lot of things about him make sense now in context, like how a promotional video for the Galaxy Garrison that heavily featured Takashi Shirogane running through a muddy obstacle course with his his standard issue t-shirt and shorts sopping wet and looking like they were painted on, followed up with tight shots of him smiling at the camera standing tall next to the senior officers in his junior cadet uniform that Lance's 7th grade public school gym teacher in Miami was required by law to show them snuck into every dream Lance had for the rest of middle school and changed the entire trajectory of his life.

Lance thumbs back to the message Christian sent him. He doesn’t want to think about the whole Kerberos tragedy right now. He idolized Shiro even beyond what he now identifies as the crush he had on him, and if he lets himself dwell on it for too long the negative voices in his head that tell him that if Takashi Shirogane can die in space, then what hope does a regular guy like Lance have? He’s worked too hard for the top spot to let his inner saboteur wreck it for him now, so he forces the bad thoughts back down. Right now is not the time for existential crisis, he thinks. Right now is for convincing a gorgeous 6’3” fireman to let Lance sit on his dick.

Lance feels a tense and excited sort of nervousness as soon as he hits send, but after a few minutes pass with no response, Lance starts to feel his anticipation dissipating. It took him almost 7 hours to respond to the first message, so he doesn’t let himself feel too disappointed that they guy didn’t write him back right away. Instead, Lance just thumbs back out of his messages to start swiping again. 

He swipes left on two guys, one who looks significantly older than his listed age of 27, and one sweet faced bespectacled boy whose bio says he’s looking for something serious. He pauses on the next guy, a hot black guy named Donovan who has the name of a trendy barber shop listed as his employer, and starts flicking through his photos. He lingers on the middle photo of Donovan climbing out of a pool, his toned chest and stomach dripping wet and his short swim trunks clinging to his thighs, with extreme interest. Lance feels a stirring in his lower belly and swipes right in a rush. 

His heart pounds a little, pleased, when his phone screen immediately darkens and Tinder tells him they’re a match. He’s poised to swipe through into his messages to introduce himself, already swept up in the half-formed fantasy of pressing himself up against a guy who looks like _that_ , when his thumb slips and the next guy comes up on the screen. Lance freezes in horror. 

_No. Way._

Lance can hear the blood rushing in his ears as he stares at the dude’s face, disbelieving. Numbly, he clicks through to the profile. It’s by far the worst profile he’s ever seen. It’s just got the one photo, which looks like an attempt at a post-shower selfie gone horribly wrong. The angle is bizarre and unflattering, the lighting is all wrong, it’s out of focus, and the guy appears to be standing in some kind of… squatters den or hoarding situation. The bio is only one sentence, and it’s so useless and devoid of personality that Lance wonders if it’s supposed to be ironic.

It doesn’t seem possible that someone could create a profile this thoroughly repulsive and put it out in the world for other people to see like this guy apparently has, but that isn’t the thing making Lance’s blood feel solid in his veins. What has Lance’s hands trembling with anxiety is… he knows this guy.

Maybe he hasn’t seen him in a couple of months, but he’d recognize that mullet anywhere.

It’s Keith.

The door to the bathroom is flung open with a loud bang and Lance startles, fumbling with his phone and swearing loudly when he nearly drops it into the toilet. He winces, his plan to stay hidden now ruined, and hastily locks his phone and shoves it roughly into his pocket. He blindly fumbles with the handle of the toilet to flush as he scrambles to his feet, but his legs are a little numb from the way he’d been sitting, so he staggers awkwardly as he spills from the stall still in a panicked rush. 

He’d carefully avoided eye contact with the boy standing at the urinals, so he didn’t see his surprised and disgusted face as Lance continues his haphazard careening out the bathroom door and into the hallway without stopping to wash his hands.

\------------ 

Lance still has two more lectures to sit through before dinner, and after dinner he’d told Hunk they could study together in the Library until it closes, so he resolves not to check his phone for the rest of the day. He spends both lectures so preoccupied with thoughts of what he should do about finding Keith on Tinder, that he forgets to take any notes. By the time dinner rolls around, studying with Hunk has been upgraded from casual plans Lance made with a friend to an absolute academic necessity. 

Once Lance makes it to the mess hall and gets his dinner tray, he makes a beeline for the round corner table where he can see Hunk and Pidge already eating together silently. Outside of their pod simulator training, the only time they ever really see each other is at meals. Hunk insisted on the three of them eating together a few weeks ago to help them bond as a team but Lance isn’t sure it’s helping. He does like the optics of the top students from each of the the Garrison’s three courses sitting separately from everyone else, though. It makes him feel good. It reminds him that he made it.

Lance has known Hunk since they first came to the Galaxy Garrison, but it feels like they’ve known each other all their lives. They’ve been rooming together since last year, and it’s honestly been a dream come true to both be assigned on the premier three man team together. Lance’s mom always asks about Hunk when he calls home, and Hunk's moms always send extra cookies wrapped up just for him as part of their legendary care packages. Sometimes, Lance thinks he feels more proud of Hunk’s accomplishments than he does his own.

When Lance finally kisses a boy, Hunk’s going to be the first person he tells about it. He knows he’ll be totally cool, and he’d honestly tell him right now, but he’s pretty sure the idea of Lance meeting strange men from the internet to hook up is one that would make Hunk sick with worry. Lance cares about him too much to make him go through that. 

Lance flings himself down at the table next to Hunk and leans dramatically against the other boy’s shoulder by way of greeting. 

“Hunk, I am having a _day_ ” he wails, letting himself milk it.

Hunk, who is used to this behavior from Lance, just snorts at him and keeps eating his sandwich.

“Hey, Lance” he says, amused. It comes out sounding more like “Hee Whuff” since he doesn’t wait to swallow first. Lance collapses against him further and Hunk jostles his shoulder playfully in reply, still laughing.

“Someone told me how you got the shits and missed most of physics” Pidge says, without looking up from his phone. His delivery is dry and deadpan, like usual, “They said they saw you limping out of the bathroom half an hour later looking sweaty.” 

This is the issue Lance has with being in such a small competitive school and his own recent notoriety. Six months ago, no one but his friends would have noticed or cared if he’d ducked out of a lecture a little early, but now that he’s the top student in his program, everything he does may as well be reported in the morning announcements. 

“And,” Pidge continues, glittering eyes the only thing cluing Lance in that he isn’t completely bored by the current topic of conversation “They said you didn’t wash your hands.”

Lance and Hunk both squawk in unison, both horrified for different reasons.

“Eugh, Lance! That’s disgusting! You’re so gross!” Hunk yells, now shrugging his shoulder violently to try to dislodge Lance as he yelps in protest. 

“That _not_ true! That’s a lie! I’m being slandered! You know I always wash my hands!” Lance yells back, clinging to his friend’s shoulders for dear life and refusing to be shaken off. 

Hunk puts down his sandwich and starts trying to shove him off in earnest, and Lance’s brother instincts start kicking into overdrive. His face splits into a wicked grin as he refuses to be shaken loose. He cackles as he begins rubbing his hands on Hunk's arms and face, anywhere he can reach. He laughs tauntingly at his friend’s expense as he twists his body around like a octopus to fight Hunk’s escalating attempts to get away from him.

“Cut it out Lance! You’re so nasty! It isn’t funny!” Hunk yelps over Lance’s laughter. 

“What’s wrong, big guy? Scared I got coooooties?” Lance continues to tease, drawing out the o. He tries to climb up Hunk arm to stick one of his fingers into the boy’s ear. 

Hunk apparently reaches his daily limit for tolerating Lance's shit, and he uses one of his legs to roughly kick Lance off the bench. He goes sprawling to the floor, still laughing, and Hunk picks up one of the cafeteria trays off the table to hold in front of himself as a shield. 

“Stay back! You can’t come back up here!” he yells, brandishing the dinner tray. 

Lance pushes himself to his feet and holds his hands out in front of himself, wiggling his fingers tauntingly as he walks towards Hunk who thrusts the tray forward and leans away from him, closing his eyes. 

“I think I have some hand sanitizer in my backpack.” Pidge says, in the same bored and slightly annoyed tone of voice he always seems to use around Lance. 

Hunk throws him a grateful look over his shoulder before turning back to Lance and swinging the tray at him like he’s swatting a fly. Lance jumps back with a yelp, which makes Hunk snort out a laugh. 

“You heard him Lance, you can come back once you sanitize your hands!” Hunk teases, swatting Lance away with more confidence now that he has the upper hand. Lance puts a hand on his chest and gasps in mock offense.

“If I have to put that stuff on my hands, what are we gonna do about your face?” he asks with a faux sincerity, before breaking and grinning wickedly again, lunging forward with his hands outstretched towards the face in question. Hunk cracks him over the head with the tray. Lance stumbles back, rubbing his head and throwing a playful scowl at his grinning best friend.

Lance opens his mouth to say something else, but he’s cut off when Pidge beans him his the head with his bottle of hand sanitizer. He picks up the bottle and shakes it menacingly at Pidge, but the young boy clearly doesn’t want to play. He sits at the table with his jaw tight, and looks a little hunched in on himself and uncomfortable.

“It’s cold and flu season,” he says, defensively, “I can’t get sick. Stop messing around Lance, people are staring.”

Lance looks around and sees that they do indeed have the attention of the entire cafeteria. He doesn’t know Pidge very well yet, since the kid didn’t come up through the Galaxy Garrison lower levels like he and Hunk did, but he does know Pidge hates being the center of attention. 

Despite being on a team together, the only stuff he knows about the guy are the same things everybody knows; that he skipped a bunch of grades to come out of nowhere to take the top spot in the communications program. The school gossip mill would probably be even thirstier for details about Pidge than they are for Lance if Pidge ever gave them anything to go on, but the boy is secretive to a fault. Lance doesn’t even know how old he actually is.

“Whatever. You guys are weak.” Lance says, rolling his eyes. He dumps a liberal amount of the hand sanitizer into his hands and rubs them together in an exaggerated motion before holding them out in front of Hunk to inspect. “Can I eat my dinner now, Howard Hughes?” 

“Yeah, you pass. You can come out of quarantine,” Hunk snorts, and then he sniffs again, “What’s that smell?” 

Lance sits back down gingerly and slides the bottle of hand sanitizer back to Pidge. 

“Marshmallow. Pidge’s hand sanitizer is scented,” he says, bringing his hand to his nose to sniff and throwing a smirk in Pidge’s direction, “I think it’s lit.”

Hunk half snorts, but Pidge’s face is turning red and he looks pretty intensely uncomfortable now. He pushes himself back from the table abruptly and grabs his bag, face blank as ever. 

“I have homework.” he says stiffly, turning to go. Lance exchanges a confused look with Hunk, who half shrugs as if to say that he doesn’t get it either.

“Lance and I are gonna be in the library working on homework tonight too, you should drop by!” Hunk says brightly, after processing the sudden exit. Pidge stares at Hunk like the other boy just invited him to come with them to eat worms.

“Nah, I’m good,” Pidge says flatly. “See you guys tomorrow.”

Lance and Hunk sit in silence for a second, watching him go. He leaves the way he always does, back hunched slightly under the weight of his backpack, scowling down at his phone.

“What’s _his_ problem?” Lance asks bitterly.

 

————-

 

Lance doesn’t let himself check Tinder until long after he and Hunk leave the library, when he’s tucked into bed and can hear Hunk snoring gently in the bunk beneath him. He unlocks his phone and opens the app, and what he sees makes him let out a small shriek involuntarily. 

“Whuh? Whaz happen?” He hears Hunk call sleepily from beneath him. He can hear the boy shifting around to look up at him and switches off his phone in a panic. 

“Sorry, nothing happened. I thought I saw a spider but it was just a shadow. Go back to sleep” Lance hisses, hurriedly. 

“Mmm, ‘kay Lance. G’night” Hunk mumbles, and Lance hears him roll over and settle back in. In a matter of seconds, Lance hears his small snores pick back up. 

Lance smiles fondly and shakes his head, then braces himself to turn his phone back on. He does, and stares in horrified disbelief as the display is unchanged. 

With shaking hands, he dismisses the alert screen and thumbs over to his messages, where his horror only grows. There are new messages from Donovan and Christian, and a few other guys he’s been messaging with, but he ignores them for now in favor of the message at the top of his list, clicking through to it as though in a trance. 

Lance reads the messages three times before, confused, he starts to put together a picture of what’s going on here. It’s the only thing that makes any sense, and honestly it’s a huge relief. The feelings Lance has for Keith Kogane are…complicated. He found him fascinating in a way he knows deep down was one sided, and the shame of that still kind of burns. 

If he’s being totally honest, Lance doesn’t think he would have been able to name his sexuality if Keith was still around, because the risk letting his fixation stray past academic rivalry into something covetous would have been humiliating. It would have made Keith’s cool disinterest in him unbearable. The threat of a reality where Keith swiped right on Lance’s profile on Tinder has been hanging over Lance all day like a thick fog, the threat of having to unpack and name his feelings was a weight on his chest. 

Lance feels lighter than air with the realization that he doesn’t have to deal with any of this. Imposter syndrome who? He doesn’t know her. He knows one thing for sure though: who ever it is behind this profile, whoever typed this message? 

It’s not Keith Kogane. Lance has never been so thrilled to be catfished in his life.

It’s late and Lance isn’t expecting a reply, so he’s pretty surprised to get one so immediately.

Lance reads the message and almost laughs out loud at the audacity of this person, but catches himself in the last minute remembering Hunk sleeping beneath him. He chews on his tongue while he types out his reply.

This time Lance knows to wait for a response, and he’s not disappointed.

Lance looks at the time at the top of his phone and winces, he has a 9AM lecture tomorrow. He knows whoever is on the other line is potentially a dangerous predator, but they’re so bad at it that he’s actually kind of having fun, but he needs to actually get some sleep if he wants tomorrow to be more productive than today was. He types his sign off with a grin.

Lance knows he said he was going to bed, but he waits for the person impersonating Keith to respond anyway. 

Lance closes out of Tinder with a smile and sets an alarm. So far, he thinks, bisexuality is working out pretty well for him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: I resized the pics to optimize them for mobile viewing!!!!!!

Lance sleeps through his alarm in the morning. This actually isn’t particularly unusual for him and has very little to do with how late he stayed up the night before and a whole lot more to do with the earplugs he’s wearing. Lance has always needed to fall asleep in full silence.

He wakes up to Hunk furiously kicking the underside of his bed. This is also not unusual.

“— turn your _fucking_ alarm off, you dickhead. Do you have any idea what time it is?” Lance hears Hunk grunting from the bunk below after he plucks an earplug out from one of his ears. Hunk punctuates each word with a kick to the middle of Lance’s back. Lance just fumbles for his phone to shut off the alarm, pushing up his silk eye mask and groaning when he sees the time.

5:30 AM.

“Sorry bud,” Lance yawns, picking the sleep out of his eyes, “You wanna come to the gym with me, since you’re up?”

“ _Eat shit and die_ , I can get another hour and a half of sleep before breakfast starts,” Hunk groans, voice muffled from how he’s buried his face into his pillow, “Rooming with you is the biggest mistake of my life.”

Lance just snorts at that, stretching his arms over his head and climbing down from the top bunk to dig through his dresser for workout clothes.

“Love you too,” he laughs, pulling his Garrison issued t-shirt over his head and shoving his orange uniform, his towel, and his shower caddy into his gym bag as quickly and quietly as he can. “I’ll get ready over at the gym so you can get an extra 30 minutes of sleep, how’s that?”

“How about you stop waking me up at the asscrack of dawn? Since when do you need to work out every morning?” Hunk mumbles back, annoyed.

“I am on a fitness _journey_ , Hunk. Not everyone can be blessed by nature with big beefy biceps, you know. It’s hard out here for the rest of us,” Lance teases, sighing dramatically and playfully poking at Hunk’s closest exposed arm. Hunk swings that arm at him blindly and gooses him in the leg. Lance jumps back, yelping in pain.

“ _Why are you still here?_ ” Hunk groans into his pillow, pulling his blankets over his head so that he’s fully hidden from view. Lance just scowls at the Hunk-shaped lump in the bed, rubbing at his thigh moodily.

“I’m leaving, jeez. I’ll be back around 7:45 to get you up for breakfast, you dick.” Lance says, shouldering his bag and heading for the door. He hears Hunk muffling an annoyed yell into his pillow in response, and snorts, wishing these doors were the sort he could slam, just to be petty.

Once he’s out in the hallway, Lance pats down the pockets of his gym bag to find his headphones and cracks his back and the joints in his hips as he lightly stretches out. The sound is one of Hunk’s pet peeves, and hearing it always makes him cringe, so Lance usually tries to wait until he’s out of earshot of his best friend before he lets himself really go to town.

Lance has been working out harder recently, if he’s really being honest with himself, and his entire body has been loudly protesting the change. His baseline for the past few weeks has been a dull all-over ache, but ever since he started comparing himself to the guys he sees online, he’s been feeling more self-conscious about his lanky frame and skinny body. He’s not really seeing much progress yet, but it’s like he told Hunk earlier, it’s a journey.

He pulls out his headphones and digs around in his pocket for his phone to blast his pump-up playlist for his walk over to the gym, when he’s given pause. Thinking about the other guys he’s been looking at online makes him itch to open his Tinder again. He knows he promised himself he wouldn’t risk checking it out in public, but when he looks around surreptitiously he doesn’t see anyone else in the hall with him. Most of his classmates won’t be up for a few hours, he reasons, so it probably wouldn’t hurt to just take a quick peek.

He’s naturally impulsive, so he's already tapping on the app even before he’s fully convinced himself it’s a good idea. He left a lot of good guys on read last night while he was dealing with whatever serial-killer wannabe impersonating Keith. He figures he might as well try to look through some of them on his walk over to the gym.

When he thumbs over to his messages though, he actually trips over his feet and stumbles a little bit. The Keith guy messaged him again. Lance's curiosity gets the better of him and he ditches his plan to talk to other guys immediately, clicking the message from Keith, unsure what to expect.

 

Lance stares at the messages and reads them over a couple of times, feeling strangely uncomfortable with the tone this guy is taking. It's starting to make him feel uneasy. Last night he'd been laughing about the guy's tactless and clumsy attempts to abduct him, but the intensity in this guy's messages and the repeated dogged insistence he has about gaining Lance's trust is edging this whole encounter into creepy territory. It's just getting too… unsettling.

He chews his lip uneasily as he berates himself for letting this weirdo get to him. He makes sure to compose a scathing reply that comes across as confidently as he did the night before, if only as a point of pride, but while he’s typing he shifts his weight uncomfortably foot to foot.

 

He reads over what he said and figures that should do it. Lance has always been good at projecting a convincing confident front, especially when he’s the one who he most needs to believe it. The last thing he wants this is for this guy to actually start getting to him. He’s feeling a lot better, mostly managed to buy into his own hype, when he see’s the guy is typing again.

 

Lance rolls his eyes. Figures this creep would start getting mad when things aren’t going his way. Lance types out a reply with a kind of morbidly amused satisfaction.

 

“What are you doing standing outside of my room?” a brittle and angry voice barks out, startling Lance. Lance fumbles with his phone, hastily shoving it into his pocket when he looks up, terrified all over again that he's been caught messaging a dude, and locks eyes with a very unimpressed Pidge.

Pidge has his little arms crossed over his chest, and is tapping one of his feet on the ground as he glares up at Lance, impatiently. He has a single bed room in the hall next to Lance's and Hunk's. The single rooms are typically a hot commodity and _should_ be assigned on basis of seniority, so Lance doesn’t know how he got one. Pidge has never said, obviously, and Lance knows him well enough now not to ask. He’s coming towards his room from the opposite end of the hallway as Lance, though, and he doesn’t appear to have slept.

“Did you sleep at all last night?” Lance asks stupidly, trying to calm his racing heart. No one saw anything, and even if someone had, that person would have been Pidge Gunderson. There’s no one at the Garrison less likely to participate in the spreading of rumors than Pidge.

“Does it matter? You’re the one who keeps crashing the simulator pod, not me,” Pidge shoots back, a little nastily, then studies him carefully for a second “Why does your face look so weird?”

Lance actually snorts at that, feeling more like himself. He’s from a huge family, so he’s pretty adept at ignoring other people’s annoyance with him. On some level, he feels like he almost gets what Pidge is about; he imagines the younger boy’s never had an easy time making friends, being as freakishly smart as he is. Lance determined a while ago that he was gonna be the one to break through Pidge’s prickly outer shell and be the first person to really befriend the kid. He actually thinks Pidge can be pretty funny, sometimes, when the boy lets his guard down.

“Pfft, like you're one to talk. That’s just my face,” he laughs, self deprecatingly. Pidge stares at him, not amused and not buying it.

“What were you looking at on your phone?” The boy asks, studying Lance coolly, like he expects to read the answer to his question printed on an error message across Lance's face if he stares close enough. Lance shifts a little, uncomfortably.

“Just, picking a play list for my work out,” Lance says, a little louder than he means to, “It's a crucial choice. One of the most important parts of working out”

Pidge squints at him hard.

“You were typing a lot, for picking music” he says, slowly.

“I answered an email too!” Lance says quickly, trying not to sweat. "From my mom!"

He can see Pidge squinting at him so hard his eyes are almost fully swallowed up by the heavy bags underneath them. Lance winces internally and wonders if he's made a mistake; because for as young as Pidge is, he's never said anything about his family. He always gets quiet and weird when Lance and Hunk try to draw him into conversations about home. He looks like he’s about to say something else, so Lance quickly talks over him with the first thing he thinks of.

“I’m heading to the gym right now, if you want to come? Maybe put some muscles on those scrawny arms?” Lance asks. The corner of Pidge’s mouth actually twitches, but otherwise he doesn't move at all as he keeps studying Lance for a second longer.

“Pass,” he finally says, turning to punch in the code for the door to his room. The door opens and he slips inside, not looking at Lance.

“See you at breakfast!” Lance calls after him, in his most obnoxious older brother voice, trying to catch a glimpse inside the boy's messy room.

“Yeah, later” he thinks he hears called back, as the door slams in his face.

Lance takes a deep breath and rubs a hand over his face as soon as he’s alone again, angry with himself for using Tinder so recklessly, and for letting the guy with Keith’s profile get so deeply under his skin. He checks the time and heaves a sigh when he realizes he's burned 20 minutes doing absolutely nothing. Scrubbing his hand over his face, he promises to himself that he's going to put online dating on the back-burner for a little bit while he gets the rest of his life back in line. He decides to run the rest of the way to the gym to make up for the lost time on his work out.

By the time he gets there, though, his resolve to stay off his phone has completely crumbled. He locks himself in a changing stall in the locker room to check and see if the guy wrote anything back.

 

Lance rolls his eyes, unsure what he expected. This guy really is just not getting it.

 

Lance types out his response and pockets his phone, unsure what it is about this creep that's making Lance so compelled to one up him instead of just leaving him alone. Annoyed with his own lack of self-discipline, Lance is determined to at least do a few sets of chest and shoulder work before it’s time to go back and wake up Hunk. He drifts over to the free weight area and gets to work, but he’s definitely still distracted. He lets himself off the hook a little earlier than usual, cutting his usual 15 minutes of ab work that he finishes with down to 4.

He goes back to the locker room to shower and change. He takes his time getting ready in the middle of the counter, smiling widely and making casual conversation with all the guys filing in and out of the locker area. He washes his face, shaves, carefully shapes his eyebrows, and styles his hair all while making a point to himself of not checking his phone even once.

——————

Lance holds out all the way through breakfast and most of his first lecture, which is astral geology. It’s one of his science electives, and the real reason he took it is because he heard it was an easy A. He may have been too transparent about treating it as a blow off class in his first couple weeks this semester, though, because now the instructor has his number. She seems to take pleasure in calling on him as often as possible.

Lance raises his hand, and she turns her head slowly to focus on him, like an owl. Her eyes narrow dangerously. 

“Well then, _Mr. McClain_ , can _you_ tell the class what properties are distinct between samples pulled from 4 Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres?” she asks, surprised to see his hand in the air.

“Oh, uh, I actually wanted to know if I could use the bathroom,” Lance answers awkwardly, lowering his hand slowly to grin winningly and scratch at the back of his head. The lecturer’s lips purse, and Lance can hear titters of laughter from his fellow students. His neck grows hot.

“One would _think_ ,” his teacher says with a barely concealed sneer, “That considering you did not _earn_  the top ranking through your own merit, you might work twice as hard now to prove you _deserve_ it.” Lance’s cheeks burn, and he tries to fight his urge to sink down in his seat. He timidly raises his hand again, running through all of the notes he looked over with Hunk the night before frantically in his head to come up with an answer that will satisfy her.

“Yes, Mr. McClain?” His teacher asks, voice dripping with fake sweetness. Lance feels himself getting offended.

“4 Vesta has a lower density which just disqualifies it from dwarf planet status. It’s classified as a protoplanet despite having a differentiated interior, and samples from its surface are porous and irradiated with large deposits of olivine. The primary crust on Ceres is denser, and it's surface has salt and ice on it,” he says, quirking an eyebrow at her, his face a picture of scholarly innocence. 

The look she directs at him is the same one he got the from the old man at the end of his street growing up the time Lance hit a baseball through his window and had the nerve knock on his door and ask for it back.

“Those are all answers I’d except on the exam, yes,” She sniffs after a moment, sounding disappointed. She turns back away from him towards the touch screen lecture board to continue class.

Lance half smirks and raises his hand again, but she pretends to ignore him. Lance is undeterred and raises his hand more insistently, waving it around a little.

“ _What_ , Mr. McClain?” the instructor finally snaps.

“I still need to use the bathroom,” he says, still a little pleased with himself at the way he’s managed to get under her skin. She waves her hand dismissively.

“ _Go,_ ” she huffs.

Lance is out the door in record time, dashing down the hall. Lance rushes into a stall and slams the lock shut, pulling out his phone to check Tinder. He reads the response the Keith impersonator guy left for him, and it almost makes him laugh. Either this guy is a complete fucking moron, or he thinks Lance is. Lance types his reply, totally fed up with being dismissed and underestimated today.

 

Like every time before, the guy responds right away.

 

This time Lance does actually laugh out loud. It was just bad luck that the asshole picked Keith's shitty selfie to run his scam with, since dicking over someone trying to pretend to be Keith is basically thereputic for Lance, who sometimes worries late at night that he's secretly doing the same thing in the pilot program. He feels lucky that he has what is basically carte blanche to fuck with this bastard, since best case scenario the dude is some lonely pervert. 

 

Lance is still laughing at his own joke when the other guy responds. His reply is short and makes Lance roll his eyes.

 

Okay, Lance thinks, he's wasted enough of his time on this dude. As much fun as he's been having dunking on him, it's probably well past time that he stops humoring him. He taps out a final farewell.

 

A reply comes through almost instantly.

 

Lance reads it, and stares, then scrolls up and re-reads their entire conversation again. He can’t really explain what he does next, except that he really _really_ doesn’t want to go back to class.

 

The other guy’s reply comes through almost instantly again.

 

Lance taps the phone number and saves it, and then unmatches the guy from his Tinder while it says the other guy is still typing a third message. He doesn't really want to be put off by whatever weird shit the guy is gonna say next. He walks out of the stall and up to the sink in the bathroom and looks himself in the eyes. He doesn’t look like he’s going crazy, but he’s also about to do something absolutely ridiculous. He walks over to the door that leads from the bathroom into the hallway and locks it, before walking back over to the sinks.

He stares deep into his own eyes like he's playing bad decision chicken with his reflection, and then hits the video call button on the number he got. He holds his phone in front of his face and stares at it while it rings, not expecting anything. He just wants the other guy to know he’s called his bluff. He just wants this bizarre catfishing adventure to be over.

The call picks up.

 

“What the fuck?!” Lance screams.

“Lance! Sorry, I wasn’t expecting a call. I might lose you. I’m in a cave.” Keith says urgently, his voice just as clipped and direct as Lance remembers. Lance feels faint.

“ _What the fuck?_ ” He repeats, weakly. Keith just stares at him like all of this is perfectly normal.

“I told you I was for real," Keith doesn't even have the decency to look very smug about it, he just keeps switching back and forth between looking around at his surroundings and leveling an uncomfortably intense stare at the camera, at _Lance._

Lance just stares at him in horrified silence, gobsmacked.

"Sorry, I’d try to get out but there are a couple of fissures I'd need to wiggle through on my stomach, and I’d have to put down the phone. Where are you? It seems like we have each other okay if I stay right here.” Keith says, as if their cell connection was the biggest problem they had to deal with right now. Lance thinks distantly that he might be dreaming.

“I’m… locked in a bathroom,” Lance says, slowly, trying to pretend his entire internal monologue isn’t currently made up only of incoherent screaming, “I... stepped out of a geology lecture.”

“Hm,” Keith nods once, firmly, like he’s thinking. Like any of this makes sense, “Then we probably shouldn’t say too much now. When do you think you could get away from campus?”

“Get— get away from campus? I— Keith, _holy shit, Keith_ , I have to get back to class! People are going to notice if I’m gone too long.” Lance stammers, completely overwhelmed.

Keith nods his head firmly once again, seemingly entirely unaffected by the absolute insanity of the situation. “Good thinking, you shouldn’t draw any attention to yourself now. Let's keep in contact over text. Save my name as something else in your phone, don’t put Keith.”

Lance just shakes his head disbelievingly.

“Yeah,” he says, dazed, and he hangs up.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you x 10000000000000 to lelex for agreeing to beta this!!!! If you notice a dramatic jump in quality it's bc of her!!!!!!! 
> 
> Also if you're like......... hey none of your pictures are the same size
> 
> listen
> 
> it's hard out here

Lance stumbles in to lunch still in a daze. He’s the first one at the table for once, and he sinks down onto the bench absently. All he’d really wanted was to exchange some dirty texts with hot guys on the internet, and maybe meet up with one of them if things were going particularly well, but now he has absolutely no idea what he’s maybe agreeing to do. He stares unseeingly at his steak salad, as if from miles away, and wonders what exactly it is about _him_ that causes things like this to always happen.

Here’s what he knows: Keith Kogane swiped right on him. In real life, this happened. He is neither exaggerating or making this up. The fucking weirdo pressuring Lance for the world’s most passionless first date has been _Keith Kogane_. The whole damn time!

Lance doesn’t know what to think. Honestly, he doesn’t even know if he can think right now.

“—Lance?” A hand waving in front of his face snaps him out of his anxious brooding. He starts, looking up into Hunk’s worried face with surprise as the other boy pulls his hand back. Lance hadn’t even noticed his teammates walking over. Even Pidge, who is paused and still holding his lunch rigidly against his chest like he isn’t sure what to do next, hovering half way between standing and sitting on Hunk’s left side, looks a little worried for him.

“I asked you if you still weren’t feeling okay,” Hunk says, furrowing his eyebrows, “I heard you missed more class today.”

Lance blinks at him dumbly for a moment like Hunk is speaking to him in a foreign language, not understanding what’s being said. Hunk’s expression is quickly crossing over the threshold from worried to actively alarmed.

“Oh, uh, yeah,” Lance croaks, suddenly remembering yesterday’s gossip about him being sick. Honestly, he’d rather his friends think he’s been shitting his brains out instead of him having to try to explain to them... whatever it is that’s actually going on with him right now, “Yeah, I dunno man. I feel like crap,” he only half lies.

Hunk bites his lip, looking torn between worry for his friend and a more generalized nebulous worry that he typically falls prey to when things go wrong.

“Are you gonna be okay to make it through the rest of the day?” Hunk asks, hesitantly, “It’s just, we have our flight systems lab with Iverson this afternoon. I’m not sure if he’ll let you make it up?”

Lance knows he can’t afford to miss this lab. He needs to pull himself together. Whatever Keith Kogane needs from him, Lance isn’t going to let it mess him up at school. Keith can throw away his own shot at being the Garrison’s top flight student, fine, but he doesn’t get to waste Lance’s chance too. He closes his eyes and tries to shake off the fugue that’s been clinging to him ever since he saw Keith’s actual face when he answered the phone.

“I know, I’ll be fine,” Lance says, blearily opening his eyes, “I wouldn’t hang you guys out to dry like that.” He meets the unconvinced looks from both Hunk and Pidge with a shrug and a grimace. Pidge has still not sat all the way down in his seat.

“Ehhh,” Hunk lets out an anxious sort of groan.

“Can I— do you want me to get you, like, a soup?” Pidge asks, avoiding Lance’s eyes, like he’s pretending the kindness is coming from someone else. Lance finds his awkwardness endearing.

“Soup would actually be really great, thanks Pidge,” Lance says, with a grateful, tired smile.

————-

Phones aren’t allowed in Iverson’s lab, but Lance takes his out anyway. Hunk explained to Iverson that Lance wasn’t feeling great and needed to sit down, so he and Pidge are the ones crawling around in the simulator pod, drilling the procedures for an emergency water landing while Lance is tasked with an absurd 16 page lab write up on different safety features. Normally, he would have loudly protested the unfairness of this, but today he’s finding it difficult to make himself care.

Lance pulls up his contact list to send a text to Keith. As per the other boy’s demands, Lance has given him a code name.

Lance types, deciding to start with the thing that’s been weirding him out the most about this whole thing since it started. Just like before, Keith responds immediately

Lance has no idea what that means, but he feels himself getting mad at Keith for being so cryptic. And what kind of teenager talks like this? Shit like this is why Lance was so sure Keith was cat-fishing him in the first place. He does not have any patience left over today for whatever weird game Keith’s playing.

Keith is already typing before Lance hits send on his second text. His reply comes through after only seconds.

Lance feels his eye twitch and his eyebrows raise. Is he serious? He picks up his phone to type out out a quick angry retort. Keith responds to him before he can even think to say anything else.

Lance seethes with indignation at Keith’s casual dismissal of the achievement Lance has worked his whole life for. Whatever, Lance thinks, Keith can kiss his entire asshole.

Keith’s reply comes fast.

Lance waits to see if Keith is going to say anything else. He rolls his eyes when it’s clear Keith isn’t intending to, and sends yet another text to prompt the answers out of him. Seeing as he’s clearly an integral part of whatever weird scheme Keith is coming up with, he’s not very good at asking for help or sharing any relevant details whatsoever.

This time it takes Keith nearly a minute to reply. Lance feels his stomach clenching with nerves.

Lance scoffs angrily. He’s about to put his phone away, despite still not understanding anything at all, and actually get down to work on his stupid and unfair assignment, when his phone lights up with another text.

Lance snorts a little before texting back.

Pidge doesn’t respond to that, but Lance didn’t really expect him to. He pulls out his flight manual, and starts grimly forging ahead on his lab write up.

At the end of the hour, Lance is almost two thirds of the way through his unnecessarily detailed and punishing problem set, when Iverson calls the three of them over to his desk.

Lance doesn’t know what it’s about, but he assumes the three of them are in trouble for some reason. Something about how Iverson’s resting face looks makes Lance generally assume his instructor is angry with him. In his defense, it’s often true.

“The three of you are unpolished. You have a lot to learn both together and individually. You are all here by the skin of your teeth. No one of you can afford to start slacking off.” He barks, once they’re all standing at attention in front of him. Lance can feel Pidge stiffening beside him and wonders if this is really necessary.

“McClain!” Iverson snaps. Lance barely winces, feeling resigned to whatever punishment he has incoming for whatever thing he’s apparently done that Iverson didn’t approve of. He’s having one of those days, so like, this might as well happen.

“Because your Rescue Pod Simulator Exam score was in the top 5% nationally, you and your team have qualified to apply for a week long internship with an operational off planet rescue team,” Iverson barks, in a tone that does not belay any praise for Lance’s achievement in the least. Lance’s eyes widen as he processes what’s being said.

“We’re getting to go off planet?” Pidge asks, sounding absolutely floored with excitement. This is the most emotion Lance thinks he’s ever seen from Pidge in as long as Lance has known him. The boy is practically vibrating.

“Ohh man,” Hunk groans, under his breath.

“I will be shocked if you three are actually selected, Gunderson,” Iverson sneers as he looks away from them and back to his datapad in a clear dismissal, “I’ve seen McClain’s test scores myself, and they’re nothing to write home about.”

“Oh, well, what a shame,” Hunk says, looking around in barely concealed relief, “No one goes to space their first year in a flight program though, right guys? There’s always next year.”

Lance just grins at him. He can’t wait to rub this internship in Iverson’s mean old face.

“We’ll get it buddy, don’t you worry about that,” Lance says, determined smile stretched across his face.

He turns his head back to Iverson to watch him steam under his uniform.

“Thank you for letting us know about this incredible opportunity, sir.” he says.

————-

An hour after Hunk falls asleep, Lance creeps past him to sneak out to meet Keith at the time Keith set this morning. Due to it’s technical status as a military research facility, the Galaxy Garrison’s security is state of the art. No one enters or exits the premise without swiping their badge. In theory, it shouldn’t be possible to get off Garrison premisses undetected, but that hasn’t slowed Lance down since half way through his first year.

The trick is in the double tap. If you swipe your ID card to enter while the doors are still open from your swipe to exit, the computer doesn’t register you as leaving the building. It still logs both swipes of your ID in the system, but the security personnel would have to comb the feed for that specifically in order to find the glitch. Even then, unless they catch you off campus, they can’t prove you were doing anything wrong, which is a motto Lance lives by.

Now, there is one problem with this, and it’s that swiping an ID whose number is already logged as being on campus flags and freezes your profile, but Lance has found this is pretty easy to work around if he just has a friend let him back in.

The guy who works the front desk at the campus gym in the morning is a douche bag, but he likes Lance, so if Lance waits for him by the gym entrance, he lets Lance buzz in with him for the low low price of a high five, a nod, and a smirk acknowledging the somewhat gross implication of the dude’s “Nice, bro. Get some.” The freedom to leave campus is well worth the cost of Lance’s dignity, in his opinion. Lance sneaks out enough to know exactly when the guy’s shift starts.

Lance waits outside the western gate a handful of minutes before the time he’s supposed to meet Keith, leaning up against the wall. A few minutes later, still a couple of minutes before the agreed upon time, he hears the roar of an engine and raises his eyebrows, impressed, when he sees a hover bike with just its low lights on speeding towards him. The craft slides to a stop 20 feet ahead of him, and Lance can barely make out Keith’s face in the shadows. It looks like he’s wearing a bandana tied over his nose and mouth, which is so on brand for Keith that it makes Lance roll his eyes back into his head.

Lance pushes himself off the wall, annoyed with himself for finding anything about Keith cool.

“Okay, Keith, I’m here. What exactly is going on?” Lance demands, walking a few steps towards the bike and crossing his arms.

“Get on,” Keith says, in place of an answer. His voice is grim. Lance splutters.

“What? No, absolutely not,” Lance says petulantly. He’s sick and tired of Keith’s continued refusal to make any sense, “Why?!”

Keith just shakes his head briefly, looking tense.

“We’re still too close. I can’t say anything here. Get on.” He says again, just as stiff and strained. Lance is incensed.

“That wasn’t the deal!” Lance hisses, “I’m not going anywhere with you!”

Lance turns around and makes like he’s going back inside, fully bluffing. Unless he wants to call Hunk, he can’t actually get back into the Garrison until 4:45 tomorrow morning, but Keith doesn’t have to know that. He hears Keith huff a sigh and get off the bike behind him.

“Wait,” Keith says, roughly grabbing Lance’s arm, and Lance turns to look at him, narrowing his eyes expectantly. Keith looks mostly frustrated, but a little surprised, like he didn’t expect to actually get this far. Lance can literally feel his eyebrows furrowing.

Whatever it is he’s about to say to convince Lance not to leave is cut off when a floodlight switches on. Keith pulls Lance’s jacket hood over his head in one smooth motion and shoves him roughly along towards his speeder.

“Move,” Keith hisses as Lance stumbles ahead of him.

“Who’s out there?” A voice calls over the speakers as Keith continues shoving Lance onto his speeder. Lance hops on, still baffled, but not wanting to get caught off campus in the middle of the night with a known delinquent, and Keith hastily swings himself up in front of Lance, revving the engine as he starts it up.

“Hold on tight,” Keith says, with a smirk back at Lance, and Lance is absolutely not here for it. The way Keith’s sitting is already pushing his ass into Lance’s crotch, which, paired with the bikes vibrations, has the potential to become a humiliating disaster. Under absolutely no circumstances is Lance gonna put his arms around Keith’s stupid waist.

“I think I can handle myself, Kogane,” Lance drawls. Due to his proximity and the noise from the bike, Lance feels Keith’s answering snort more than he hears it.

“Suit yourself,” Keith yells, leaning forward to grab the throttle.

The bike under Keith takes off like a shot, and Lance has to scramble and grab him tightly to keep from falling off the back. He plasters himself fully against Keith’s back with a small shriek, and he can feel the other boy shaking with laughter.

 _I can’t believe I’m actually gonna die on a Tinder date_ , Lance thinks, miserably. Keith Kogane might have been the Garrison’s best space pod pilot in a generation, but he drives his speeder like he doesn’t care if he lives or dies. Every time this asshole nearly lays them out sliding through a turn, Lance’s grip around his waist tightens involuntarily. He feels Keith’s stomach and back muscles spasm with laughter. This dude is the _worst._

Lance feels his stomach turn over. He makes a mental note to apologize for Hunk for all the shit he’s given him this past year for yakking in the simulator pod, if he survives the ride. And if he survives the night after that.

When the speeder finally comes to a sliding stop, Lance sits completely frozen, still unable to bring himself to unclench any of the muscles in his body, as if he’s still expecting not to make it. Keith waits a few seconds for him to let go, before getting impatient and peeling Lance’s arms away from his stomach roughly and jumping off the front of the bike.

“Okay, we’re here.” Keith says in a slightly impatient but still mostly flat voice. Lance is actually kind of impressed at the complete lack of intonation.

Lance opens his eyes slowly to see Keith has tugged down his bandana and is standing with his arms crossed, scowling at Lance for still being sat on the bike. He looks around then, surveying his surroundings. The place Keith apparently needed to bring him for whatever it is that he couldn’t talk about while they were anywhere near the Garrison’s campus is... a dilapidated shack in the middle of nowhere.

Lance feels his anxiety rising as a vision of Keith who, driven insane by his meteoric fall from grace, has begun luring innocent Garrison students out to his murder cabin in the desert to extract his grisly revenge plays out like a movie in full color in his mind’s eye.

“Uh,” Lance says shakily, looking around and mentally kicking himself for being the hot slutty girl at the beginning of every horror movie, “Please remember all the times that you did definitely promise not to murder me at all,”

Keith starts at that, rearing back slightly from Lance looking affronted, and holding up his hands as if to prove they’re empty.

“What are you talking about?” he huffs, sounding genuinely baffled, “I haven’t even touched you.”

Lance gapes at him in complete disbelief. Keith genuinely seems not to understand the implications of the situation he himself has created, which is _wild._ Just like before, on Tinder, Lance is struck by how… not self-aware Keith has to be to not understand what it looks like when he does stuff like this.

“Well,” Lance says finally after a long exhale and a quick press of his fingers to his temples, “This isn’t like, the _least_ serial-killer-y shack in the middle of nowhere I’ve ever been brought to in the dead of night,”

Keith jerks his head around to look consideringly at the shack in question before turning back to stare hard at Lance, narrowing his eyes.

“It belonged to my dad,” Keith says, with a defensive shrug that’s not nearly as self-conscious as Lance thinks he should be, “I didn’t know where else to go after the Garrison kicked me out,”

Lance pinches the skin on the bridge of his nose to try to think, all the pieces of Keith’s weirdness in the past two days finally starting to fall together to create a full picture. Of course Keith’s still preoccupied by his abrupt ejection from the Garrison. He must have some scheme in mind to get back in that he thinks Lance can help him with from the inside.

Lance flexes one of his feet, testing his muscles to see if they’ve recovered enough from the ride over that they can support his weight again, and shakily slides himself off the bike to stand eye to eye with Keith. He stands as tall as he can manage and crosses his arms, which is fast becoming his default position when confronted with….all that Keith is. If Keith thinks Lance is going to help bring back his rival and give up his hard-earned pilot seat, he must be insane. Still, Lance isn’t about to say any of that while Keith’s got him trapped way out here at his dad’s old murder hut. Plus, he _does_ have a couple of hours to kill before he needs to be back at the Garrison. He may as well just hear the guy out.

“Okay, let’s make this fast,” Lance blusters, with all the fake confidence he can muster in the situation, “Go ahead and say whatever it is you want to say about you getting expelled that you think I can somehow do jack- _dick_ about. And try to make it quick, I have class at 10 tomorrow.”

Keith’s brow furrows, and he stares at Lance a little dumbfounded, as if Lance is the one not making sense. Which, _really?_

“You want me to tell you about...getting kicked out of the Garrison?” He says, hesitantly, like he’s just trying all the words out for the first time. Lance raises an eyebrow and cocks one of his hips, unimpressed.

“I assume that’s what this is about?” He asks, with an impatient flick of one of his hands. The furrow between Keith’s brows deepens.

“That’s only… barely part of it,” he says hesitantly, after a second of confused staring, “Look, can we just go inside? It’ll be easier if I just show you.”

Lance heaves a deep sigh, before shrugging resignedly.

“It better not be anything weird,” Lance huffs under his breath, nodding for Keith to lead the way. He follows at a wary pace as Keith hops up onto the porch and fumbles to unlock the flimsy looking screen door.

“ _Or_ your dick,” Lance adds louder as an afterthought, just to be an ass. Keith freezes, dropping his keys, his spine going rigid. Lance laughs meanly at his expense, feeling his confidence balloon. All things considered, Lance feels like a little bullying on his part is more than warranted in this weird ass situation. It’s only leveling the playing field, and fuck does it feel good to finally watch the other boy squirm.  

He practically skips up onto the porch next to Keith and leans up against the door jam in a way that is exaggeratedly casual, grin widening when he sees that Keith’s face is flushed bright red and his eyes are bugging, horrified. Lance raises an eyebrow, gesturing down at the fallen keys.

“So, like, are you gonna let me in or what?” Lance asks.

He cackles loudly when Keith pointedly avoids looking Lance in the eyes, diving to the ground, snapping up his keys, and unlocking his front door with jerky, awkward motions. Lance keeps laughing even as he follows him inside.

Then Keith turns on the lights.

 _You’re in danger, girl_ , Lance thinks to himself absently, looking around at all the papers and photos Keith has pinned up covering the walls. It really does look like a scene from a movie. Keith really is insane.

“What… _is_ all this?”


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> my very patient and good beta lelex has really done it again this time and made this mess readable. 
> 
> she is very good and her tumblr is le-lex.tumblr.com

_ Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,  _ Lance thinks, frantically, checking his watch for what must be the seven hundredth time in the last forty seconds from his look out post in the hall. 

Lance is sweating gross dark half-moons into the pits of his second-cleanest senior cadet uniform. Last week, when they’d been coming up with this stupid plan in Keith’s awful, cracked-out conspiracy den, he’d half been planning to make sure his laundry was done well before tonight. Between sneaking out to see Keith at night to finalize things, though, and studying his ass off to try to get that internship during the day, doing his laundry ended up slipping by the wayside. He’s ended up giving Keith the only clean uniform shirt Lance has left to wear for this god-forsaken hair-brained scheme of theirs. 

Even though Lance seriously doubts Keith has done his laundry even one time in the last six months he’s been out in the desert hermitting it up, the idea of Keith maybe smelling something gross on clothes he’d borrowed from  _ Lance _ is somehow completely unacceptable to him. Lance doesn’t bother trying to think about why that might be.

Lance flaps his arms like an anxious chicken, trying to dry his nervous pits.  _ No one can know that I sweat! _ Lance’s brain screams, now in full-on manic disassociation, transparently attempting to shield him from the complete depths of gripping  _ terror _ he starts to feel whenever he really lets himself consider the consequences of the thing it is he’s doing right now.

Keith’s taking way longer than they allotted for to look for the classified Kerberos Mission report in the Garrison Records Room, and Lance  _ really  _ doesn’t want to let himself think about what’ll happen to the two of them if they get found out. They really should have been better prepared for this. 

_ Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!!!  _ Lance thinks, desperately, checking his watch again. 

As if answering the siren call of Lance’s anxiety, Keith comes barreling full tilt around the corner, looking rumpled in his borrowed uniform, clutching a thin file and data drive under his arm, with wide, bright,  _ crazy _ eyes. He crashes full body into Lance and grabs one of Lance’s arms with his free hand, dragging Lance along without breaking his stride. 

“Someone might have seen me,” Keith says, still running, voice low and wild eyes darting around everywhere without looking at Lance, “We need somewhere to hide.” 

Lance’s eyes widen in sheer panic as his mind races and his legs scramble to keep up. Keith still hasn’t let go of his arm.  _ Why do things like this always happen to me? _ He thinks, mind settling on a makeshift plan as he tugs the two of them to the right to duck down a hallway of dorm rooms, body on autopilot.  _ What have I done to deserve this? _ It’s late enough that the dorm hallways should be mostly empty. It isn’t the worst place to try to hide.

They skid around a corner just in time to see a tiny figure surreptitiously darting out into the hallway, almost comically weighed down by a large backpack, clearly trying not to make a sound. 

Lance can feel his scattered thoughts crashing back together in a tangled and frantic heap as he updates his plan on the fly. He could almost cry with the relief he feels, seeing this kid. He stumbles into a gangly sprint, dragging Keith along after him to intercept the unsuspecting boy at his door. 

“Pidge,” Lance gasps, grabbing the kid’s backpack and spinning him around violently, voice thick with equal parts relief and desperation, “You have to let us into your room.”

Lance can see Pidge’s little face blinking at him from behind his oversized glasses for just a second, before glancing around to survey the whole scene of him and Keith together, both looming over him in the hallway frazzled and somewhat out of breath, and his expression shifts seamlessly from shock to recognition to annoyance in record time. 

“What? No.” the boy scowls, curling in on himself slightly and shrugging Lance off with a harsh jerk of his body. 

Lance grabs the boy by his shoulders and reels him back, unwilling to let Pidge slip away from him, the looming threat of discovery making him panic. 

“Pidge, you have to help us,” he whispers, harshly, involuntarily shaking Pidge slightly for emphasis as he talks, “We  _ really  _ can’t get caught!”

Pidge just raises one of his eyebrows, clearly unimpressed by Lance’s theatrics, and gingerly attempts to peel away one of Lance’s hands gripping his shoulders with two fingers, the way he might remove a large slug, or something else that’s slimy and distasteful. It makes Lance grind his teeth.

“Caught.” Pidge says, in a blank voice that isn’t a question. 

There’s tense silence for a few seconds, and Keith apparently just fucking  _ snaps _ . He slams Pidge up against the wall with a rough shove to the boy’s chest so his head bounces against the keypad in a way that looks like it must have been pretty painful. He’s holding a  _ knife _ to the kid’s throat.

_ Where the fuck did he get a knife?  _ Lance thinks, distantly, watching the scene play out in front of him as though he’s behind a pane of glass. The sound Pidge’s head made when it hit the keypad is echoing in his brain.

“We don’t have time for this. Let us in.” Keith snarls at Pidge, face contorted in wild rage, “Now!”

“What the  _ shit _ is your damage, dude?” Pidge spits up at Keith, pissed, and seemingly entirely unfazed by the fact that Keith has about fifty pounds and a fucking  _ knife  _ on him, “Lance, get your crazy-ass friend  _ the fuck  _ off me” 

Lance blinks and shakes his head to bring himself back into his body. He surges forward, roughly hauling Keith away from Pidge by the backs of his arms. 

“Jesus, Keith, what the fuck?” Lance hisses, disbelieving. Keith’s face is twisted up in anger, and his eyes look completely feral. Lance puts what he hopes is a comforting hand in the middle of his chest as he positions his body between Keith and Pidge, “ _ Chill.”  _

Lance turns back to Pidge, still holding Keith back, to plead with him one more time.

“Pidge,  _ please _ ,” he begs, voice low and serious, “If we get caught, they’re gonna expel me.” 

Pidge just rubs his neck and scowls, hunching his shoulders defensively, his bruised ego making him avoid looking Lance in the eye. 

“That sounds like a  _ you _ problem.” the kid says harshly, glaring viciously at the floor.

Lance kind of already knew that Pidge didn’t give much of a shit about him on his best day, which today is decidedly  _ not,  _ but it still stings to see his total lack of regard for Lance playing out in real time. Lance’s shoulders sag a little, defeated, when he’s struck by a moment of inspiration. 

Since the day that he met the guy, Lance has only actually seen Pidge give even  _ half _ a shit about one thing. And that one thing? It’s something Pidge needs to keep Lance around for. 

“It’s a you problem too,” Lance blurts out in a rush, excited, talking almost too fast to be understood, “If I get expelled, they won’t let you and Hunk go offplanet!”

Pidge freezes, nostrils flaring as he stares angrily at Lance, tendons jumping in the sides of his jaw as he grinds his teeth. Lance sees his eyes widen as a brief furious raw hunger flashes over the boy’s face before the glare from the light makes his glasses opaque in a distinctly disconcerting way.

_ C’mon,  _ Lance thinks,  _ you need me. C’mon. You know you want to… _

Pidge snarls wordlessly, like a fox caught in a bear trap, and pivots where he stands. He punches in the code to his dorm room with sharp, angry, deliberate jabs. 

“ _ Fine,”  _ the boy mutters, without turning around to look at them as his door slides open with a little  _ woosh _ , “Just don’t look at or touch anything.” 

_ “Thank you,”  _ Lance stutters out, gratefully, as he drags Keith into the room as quick as he can before Pidge can change his mind. 

The room is pretty filthy and cluttered in a way that would usually make Lance’s lip curl, but in this moment he’s so dizzy with relief that it barely even registers. Pidge could have his own excrement smeared on the walls, and it would still be the most wonderful room Lance has  _ ever _ been in. 

Pidge closes the door with another press of a keypad and then takes a deep breath. The kid squares his shoulders and turns slowly to look Lance and Keith dead in the eyes, raising his chin defiantly. 

“Okay. I helped you. Now  _ talk _ ,” Pidge says challengingly, in a firm flat voice, “Why are you gonna get expelled?”

Lance stares at Pidge blankly for a moment. He’d... kind of thought that part had been obvious. 

“Well, uh,” he says, holding Pidge’s gaze and gesturing uselessly at Keith with both hands like that Will and Jada Smith red carpet picture, “I kinda snuck Keith in?”

Pidge doesn’t look satisfied with that at all, his eyes darting between Lance and Keith impatiently, as if waiting for a further explanation. His fingers flex where they’re clamped to his crossed arms.

Lance glances at Keith out of the corner of his eye for help and notices, with a pang of frustration, that Keith is looking wide eyed all around Pidge’s room, which is one of the two things Pidge  _ specifically _ told them not to do as a condition for not wrecking their whole shit _.  _ Lance elbows him sharply in the ribs. 

Keith scowls at Lance for a moment, and then waves awkwardly at Pidge, as if the kid had maybe forgotten who Keith was in the last  _ thirty seconds since Keith pulled a fucking knife on him _ . Lance’s eye twitches. He has never hated Keith’s complete lack of social awareness more than he does in this moment.

Pidge’s eyes narrow to angry slits.

“And Keith is…?” Pidge says, in a tone that says very clearly he’s not going to ask a second time. 

Understanding hits Lance like a lightning bolt. 

Pidge transferred into the Garrison three months after Keith was expelled.  _ Pidge doesn’t have any clue who Keith Kogane is.  _

Finally, something tonight is going their way. Lance thinks for a second, wondering how exactly he can use this  _ gift.  _ He can probably get away with telling Pidge a partial truth, and avoid confessing to any of the serious crimes he and Keith committed today altogether. 

He still doesn’t totally trust Pidge won’t turn them in after this. Considering what they’ve put him through so far tonight, it honestly would be fair. 

“He’s… a guy,” Lance says, awkwardly, “We, uh… met on Tinder.” 

Lance feels himself tense up in a way that he knows is stupid. Coming out as bi is definitely preferable to, like, incriminating himself and Keith in the theft of top secret government documents. Still though it’s… the first time he’s ever said it to an actual real life person. 

He  _ knows  _ it’s dumb, but he’s still scared. 

Lance peeks up with one eye after a moment of total silence to gauge Pidge’s reaction. Pidge is staring at him, blankly, and doesn’t seem to be reacting at all. 

“I’m bisexual?” Lance tries again, a little more explicitly, and braces himself again, opening both eyes this time. He feels himself growing annoyed at the way Pidge’s expression stays frustratingly blank. 

Completely oblivious to everyone else in the room, Keith has managed to wander away from Lance and Pidge without either of them noticing. When Lance finally looks to him for help, he’s all the way on the other side of Pidge’s room, picking up and examining what appears to be a small, unfinished, scrundled-together satellite dish attached to some kind of home-made computer. 

“What is all this stuff?” he mutters, mostly to himself, bringing it up close to his face to examine it. 

“I said don’t touch anything!” Pidge snaps, stomping over to Keith and snatching the thing out of his hands with a startling speed. Pidge whirls back on Lance, looking incredibly annoyed, “Why couldn’t you hide him in  _ your _ room?” 

“Well,” Lance says weakly, scratching the back of his neck uncomfortably, “Uh, I mean… Hunk’s in there, so…” Lance trails off with an awkward grimace. 

Pidge just raises both his eyebrows, giving Lance a withering look that makes no secret about the fact that Pidge currently finds him almost criminally stupid.  _ If he only knew,  _ Lance thinks, wryly.

“You… snuck a guy on campus,” Pidge says, voice slow and incredulous,  “And you don’t want Hunk to know about it? What were you  _ planning _ to do with him?” 

Lance winces, mind scrambling to come up with some kind of plausible excuse. Luckily, he doesn’t actually end up having to say anything, because Keith has wandered off again and continues to be an absolute monster. He interrupts again, without even realizing that’s what he’s doing, from where he’s standing across the room, shuffling through some papers on Pidge’s desk. Lance spares a quick look up to the ceiling, a silent plea to God to give him strength because apparently his co-conspirator was literally raised in a barn. Or maybe a murder shack.

“Are these satellite feeds of Kerberos?” he asks, face intense as he holds up the images in question, completely failing to read the room. 

Pidge’s eyes snap over to Keith and his face contorts, looking the most furious Lance has seen him look so far tonight, which is an achievement. Lance could  _ throttle _ Keith right now.

“Lance, tell your asshole boyfriend to stop looking at my stuff!” Pidge yells, stomping over to where Keith is standing. 

“Keith, can you  _ please  _ just come here!” Lance begs, totally exasperated. He feels like an owner of a naughty pet who keeps patting his thighs to get them to come over to him. This thought makes a hysterical laugh bubble up in his throat that he literally has to seal between his teeth to prevent from being released.

Keith actually listens to Lance, for once in his goddamn life, and crosses over to where Lance is in four long quick strides. 

This is bad news for Pidge, who tries confronting Keith about midway through the room. He doesn’t slow Keith down at all; honestly Pidge’s anger doesn’t even seem to really register to him. Keith just kind of impatiently shoves Pidge’s head out of his way absently when Pidge tries to snatch the satellite images back, and sends Pidge flying across the room like he weighs nothing at all. He crumples onto the floor with an indignant squawk, and Lance winces sympathetically at the crash. And Keith doesn’t even  _ look _ . His eyes are locked on Lance, and are so bright with excitement, and it leaves Lance feeling sort of… stunned.  

Lance knows he shouldn’t be into this, and that he _should_ be angry with Keith for antagonizing Pidge when the boy is _the only thing standing between the two of them and a life in prison_ , but instead he just feels kind of… flustered. Keith can be so _cool_ sometimes. If you’re into that whole stupid, shitty, bad-boy thing. Which Lance _isn’t_. Fucking obviously.

“Look at this. This is satellite imaging from Kerberos, around the same time as the Kerberos mission,”  Keith says, holding up the pictures in front of Lance’s face, all bright eyes and tense urgency, “Lance, what do you make of this?”

Lance has to shake himself out of his momentary reverie and tear his eyes away from Keith’s to take in the implications of the pictures Keith’s holding a six inches from his face. It’s been a long night. His brain isn’t firing on all cylinders right now.   
  


Lance stares hard, trying to make sense of what he’s seeing.

“What… is  _ that _ ?” he whispers, blinking up at Keith after a few seconds. Keith opens his eyes wide and nods at him a little nonsensically, looking unbelievably excited. 

Lance just stares at him, transfixed. 

Then the picture is torn out of his hands and Pidge’s snarling face takes its place in Lance’s field of vision. His glasses are askew, and he’s so angry he’s turning purple. 

“Alright, you  _ fucks _ ,” the boy spits out, hissing like an angry cat.  Some of his spittle hits Lance on the cheek, to which Lance belatedly thinks,  _ gross _ , “You’re officially out of warnings. Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t turn your asses in right  _ now. _ ” 

“I won’t let you.” Keith says, firmly, reaching again for his knife. 

Lance swats it out of his hands and glares at him incredulously.  _ This fuckin guy. _

“No, Keith! God _ damn _ ! _ Cool  _ it!” Lance snaps at him. The look he gets back from Keith is confused and betrayed, like a he’s a puppy Lance just smacked with a newspaper for piddling on the carpet.  _ Unbelievable _ . Lance doesn’t have time to unpack that right now. 

He turns to face Pidge, ready to beg. Prepared to do whatever he needs to in order to save their skins here.

“Pidge, please don’t turn us in.” he begs, voice low and earnest, hands up like he’s facing off with an angry bear. 

“Why! Give me one reason why I shouldn’t!” Pidge yells, his voice reaching pitches Lance knows it won’t be able to hit anymore in a couple of years, once the boy goes through puberty, “Who the fuck is this guy, Lance?!”

Lance takes a deep breath. He’s gonna have to put it all out on the line here. 

“Okay,” he says, feeling strangely like he’s floating outside his body and looking down at himself, “I kind of lied a little bit about who Keith is and what he’s doing here.”

If anything, Pidge just looks angrier.

“So, what, you’re  _ not _ bisexual?” he grits out, crossing his arms and somehow narrowing his eyes even further.

“No—“ Lance starts, but then thinks better of it, “Well, I mean, actually  _ yeah _ , but not like, you know, with Keith.” 

Pidge looks just about ready to blow, and Lance flicks his gaze back and forth between him and Keith before deciding, yep,  _ fuck it.  _ He’s really gonna have to fully trust Pidge. It’s a huge gamble, but it’s their only play. 

“Okay… Here’s the real truth,” He says after a long sigh, “The Garrison knows more about what happened on Kerberos than they’re telling us. Keith’s brother was the pilot for that mission, so I helped Keith break in tonight to mmm—“ Lance’s confession is cut short when Keith’s hand slaps over his mouth and pulls his entire head back along with his body so his back is pressed to Keith’s front. Lance’s eyes practically roll back into his head, they really don’t have time for this.

"Lance, shut up,” Keith hisses, “Your friend doesn’t need to know all of that!”

Lance shrugs off Keith’s hand, letting himself finally get angry. Honestly, Keith has  _ some  _ nerve. What has Keith done today, really, besides make messes for Lance to clean up? Nothing, that’s what. 

“Oh, I’m sorry for trying to save your dumb ass from getting  _ court martialed _ !” Lance snaps, yelling and throwing his hands up into the air, channeling all the stress of the night to focus into a laser beam of frustration with Keith locked in his sights, “Maybe my  _ friend _ would have been more willing to help us if  _ you _ would stop trying to  _ stab him! _ ”

“I wasn’t trying to stab him!” Keith shouts back, having the audacity to look offended, “I don’t want to stab him, I just needed him to get out of my way!”

“Well, maybe next time figure out how to say that without  _ using a knife!” _ Lance yells, voice getting hysterical. Keith kind of half shrugs and shakes his head, as if Lance is the one being ridiculous here. Lance is so indignant at that he doesn’t even know where to  _ start.  _

Keith walks away from Lance while Lance is still wordlessly spluttering and peers out the door through the peephole. 

“I think the coast is clear,” he says, voice infuriatingly even, “We should get out now while it’s still dark.” 

“Don’t go.” Pidge says, his voice soft.

Lance starts a little, and then immediately feels guilty. He was so consumed in his lover’s quarrel with Keith, he somehow almost managed to forget Pidge was still here. In  _ his _ room.

“Pidge,” he says, turning, breathlessly apologetic even as he takes steps backwards to follow Keith to the door, “ _ Thank  _ you. I promise I’ll never ask for anything again if you don’t tell anyone about this. I’m  _ so _ sorry about tonight. I owe you  _ my life.” _

“Stop!” Pidge yells, grabbing Lance by the sleeve of his uniform, “I’m not Pidge! My name is Katie.”

“Wha—oh!” Lance says, faltering, scrambling to figure things out the best he can manage on the fly, trying to slot this new revelation into place. Maybe this is Pi— _Katie’s_ way of saying Lance can trust her with his secrets too? The girl _has_ proven to be pretty emotionally stunted in the past when it comes to showing affection, “Wow, Katie, thank you for trusting me with that—“

“Ugh, no—“ Katie interrupts him, sounding frustrated for a second before she seems to pause, “Well, I mean, actually, I guess it’s a _ little  _ like that, but that’s not what I was— my name is Katie Holt,” she says, lifting her chin to look Lance square in the eye, “My brother was on the Kerberos mission too.”

Lance just gapes at her, stunned, and  _ definitely  _ not understanding anything that’s going on anymore. The girl huffs and quirks a small smirk at him, then turns her focus to Keith, who's spine has gone rigid with shock. 

Slowly, from where he stands in front of the door, Keith turns around. 

—————

Lance gets chased back to his own room by Katie around midnight. She’s right to say that Keith shouldn’t try to leave the Garrison tonight while the security is on high alert, and that Keith should stay the night in her room and escape tomorrow when things have quieted down,  _ and _ that if they don’t want Hunk to know something’s up, Lance needs to go back and sleep in his own bed. She’s definitely right, but Lance doesn’t have to like it.

The truth is, he feels kind of weird and superfluous now, seeing Katie and Keith together. Lance had kind of stupidly thinking of this whole blowing the lid off of a big Garrison conspiracy as being his and Keith’s thing together. Kind of like, Lance and Keith, back-to-back, solving a mystery and taking on the world together.  But now he’s starting to see that it isn’t that at all. 

They’re both way smarter than him, they’re both ready to dedicate their whole lives to this, and Lance is just… some guy. That’s who he is in this story: Keith and Katie are heroes on an epic quest to find their families and Lance is just… the random idiot who, on his own stupid quest to get dicked down, got hoodwinked into helping the two of them find each other. 

It’s weird realizing that, for all the blood, sweat, and tears he’s poured into clawing his way to the top, into making sure he’s noticed and appreciated in some backwards way, into never being overlooked, Lance has still ended up a minor, supporting character in a story about somebody else. 

And not just anybody else, but  _ Keith Kogane. _

Isn’t that a kick in the balls.

Lance heaves a big sigh and punches in the door code to his dorm room. The door  _ whooshes  _ open, and Hunk looks up at him from over the top of the class notes he’s going over in bed. Lance half smiles and tiredly raises a hand in greeting.

“Hey, Lance,” Hunk greets, looking up at him with a lazy, unworried smile, “Where have you been? You look exhausted.” 

Lance runs a hand through his hair and tries to huff a self-deprecating laugh in response, but his heart’s not in it. 

“Yeah, man. I’m beat,” he says, missing light-hearted by a mile and just sounding strained, yanking his rank uniform shirt over his head in preparation for sleep, “I was studying with, uh, Pidge. Internship stuff.” 

“Since when do you two hang out?” Hunk asks with an incredulous snort, quirking his brow at Lance in a bemused sort of way as Lance strips down to his boxer-briefs, leaving his clothes in a heap at the foot of the bed. Lance is usually pretty fussy with his clothes, but right now he can’t bring himself to care. 

Lance just shrugs.

“Since tonight, I guess,” he says, voice shorter than he means it to be. Hunk looks a little taken aback.

“Ugh, man. I’m just really wiped out. I need to go to sleep like, four hours ago.” Lance says, scrubbing a hand over his face.

“Uh, sure. Okay. Night, Lance” Hunk says, shrugging at Lance good naturedly, before quickly becoming reabsorbed in revising his notes. 

Lance climbs up the ladder to his bunk and lays on his back for a few minutes, just listening to the familiar sounds of Hunk studying. The periodic turning of a page or the gentle sound of Hunk scratching something out with the tip of his pen is pleasant and grounding. 

Lance heaves another big sigh, and then flops over onto his stomach to hang his head off the side of his bed to look at Hunk.  It's a position that has carried them through thousands of hours of late night conversations over the past two years . It settles something that’s aching deep inside of him.

“Sorry for being such a dick tonight, Hunk,” Lance says, looking at his best friend’s face upside down, “I had kind of a shit day.”

Hunk snorts, looking up at Lance with a playful grin. 

“As opposed to, what, all the times when you  _ aren’t _ a dick?” Hunk says, not bothering to disguise his teasing, “Newsflash, asshole, but you’ve been a bastard this entire goddamn time.” Hunk snorts, rolling his eyes. 

Lance gasps in mock offense and reaches back behind himself to snatch up his pillow, swinging it down to try to whack Hunk in the face. He misses, and totally sends his roommate’s papers and pens flying to scatter behind the bed and across the floor in the process. 

“Hunk! Garrett!  _ Rude _ !” Lance laughs, punctuating each of his words with a hit while Hunk tries in vain to safeguard what’s left of his study materials from Lance’s pillowy onslaught, “I! Am! A!  _ Delight _ !”

Hunk reaches up and grabs for Lance’s pillow, tugging hard to either wrench it out of his grasp or else wrestle Lance out of his bed and onto the floor, and then they’re  _ both  _ laughing. Just two eighteen year olds being dumb teenage boys together. Just guys being dudes. 

It’s a pretty good ending to what could have, in a slightly different universe, easily turned into the worst night of Lance’s life. 

Lance falls asleep feeling okay.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is a little bigger than usual, but I needed to get all of this out of the way! 
> 
> Also, heads up, this is a tiny spoiler but it's also a trigger warning, so I sort of feel like I gotta put it out here: 
> 
> .  
> .  
> .
> 
> Lance does get outed to Hunk against his will in this chapter. I promise it's not too bad, but if that might hurt some people to read, I wanted to give those people a chance to brace themselves.
> 
> .  
> .  
> .
> 
> Big big thanks as always to my beta lelex!

Lance is warm and comfortable laying on his back with his eyes closed, listening to the familiar roar and crash of the waves. It’s a sound that always puts him at ease, and he relaxes back further, opening his eyes gradually as he buries his fingers into the warm sand. 

He sits up slowly and looks around. He’s surprised to see he isn’t at a beach in Miami, where he grew up, but as soon as the surprise registers, it’s gone. This is  _ Varadero.  _ Of course it’s Varadero. The place where he was born, where his family’s from. 

Where his heart is. 

The beach is completely empty, which is unheard of at any time of year, but Lance feels so at peace that the unusualness of that it doesn’t occur to him to think much of it. He just flops down on his back and again with a happy sigh and listens to the waves, soaking up the sun on his skin and staring serenely up into the cloudless and endlessly blue sky. 

“Can you get my back?” comes a familiar flat voice to Lance’s left. 

Lance rolls over lazily to see Keith laid out in the sand next to him. He’s stretched out on his stomach wearing only a small black swim trunks, and he’s holding out a bottle of sunblock towards Lance expectantly. 

It doesn’t occur to Lance to question what Keith is doing here. Everything about this just feels  _ right.  _ Some kind of bone-deep, fated rightness that Lance doesn’t bother wasting any time to try to understand. He takes the bottle from Keith’s hand with a playful grin. 

“Sure,” Lance says easily, still grinning at Keith, as he sits up to swing a leg over Keith’s back to settle his weight firmly on the swell of Keith’s ass, “I wouldn’t want to let you get burned on my watch.”

The drone of the ocean seems to grow louder. Lance glances back over his shoulder and notices that the tide coming in. 

“I know,” Keith says, his voice drawing Lance’s attention away from the water. He smiles warmly when Lance meets his eyes, and Lance feels like all the nerve endings in his body buzz with electricity, “I always trust you to have my back.” 

Lance giggles at Keith’s joke, and his heart feels swollen in his chest, soaked in complete self assurance that he  _ is _ wholly worthy of Keith’s trust. His body feels strangely powerful at the moment, like it’s crackling with energy, as if he could crush boulders with his bare hands, or could clear tall buildings in a single jump. But even as he takes note of this, it doesn’t strike Lance as out of the ordinary. 

Lance squirts the sunblock on the smooth pale skin of Keith’s back and momentarily finds himself transfixed by the way the lotion splatters, looking almost pornographic in how it pools in the dimples of Keith’s spine. The crashing waves seems to break even louder still in Lance’s ears as he presses firmly with the heels of his palms to drag up the expanse of Keith’s back. Lance slowly smooths the thick sunscreen all the way up to Keith’s shoulders, relishing the feel of Keith’s skin yielding under the weight of his hands. 

Keith lets out a low moan that barely be heard over the sound of the ocean as Lance leans his body forward to smear lotion on Keith’s upper arms. Hearing Keith’s sounds of pleasure make him excited, but only from a distance. It’s unhurried and without any trace of feverishness. The mood is incredibly sensual, sure, but it’s not overtly sexual. 

Lance takes his time, letting his hands linger appreciatively, exploring all the different muscles of Keith’s arms, shoulders, and back.

He presses his hands down slowly to rub the lotion into Keith’s sides. His thumbs slot into all the silken grooves of soft skin over hard bone until he reaches the bottom of Keith’s ribcage, and trails just his fingertips down the length of Keith’s body to toy with his hip bones, which Lance isn’t at all surprised to find are now bare to his touch. He likes how attractive Keith looks between his parted thighs, admiring the way the colors of their skin contrast. 

The roar of the ocean is deafening now. 

Actually, it doesn’t really sound like the ocean anymore. 

Lance looks back over his shoulder again and sees the crests of the waves are reaching heights like he’s never seen in waves in real life before. There’s a thought pressing up against his mind that he can’t quite find the shape of. It’s intense and weird and out of place and he spares a belated thought that it feels like a connection. To what, he isn’t sure. Lance finds himself transfixed by the unbelievable  _ blueness _ of the ocean today. It’s bright blue, even in the places where it should be white from the foam of the breaks. 

There’s something out there behind the waves, too. When he squints it feels like he can see it in the water, it’s something  _ big, _ but he can’t make it out. Trying to focus on it is like trying to stare directly into the sun. 

 

—-

 

Suddenly Lance is freezing cold, and he wakes up with a shout as his blankets are yanked off his body. 

“Fuck!” Lance yells, voice too loud, as he curls tightly into a ball to preserve his body heat. He rips off his eye mask to glare angrily at his best friend, “ _ Hunk,  _ what?!”

Hunk’s face is stricken where it’s bobbing along the side of Lance’s bed, nervously swaying on his feet. He’s worrying Lance’s blanket and sheet between his hands, twisting with uncertainty. Hunk’s mouth moves tremulously, but there’s no sound.  

Lance digs an earplug out of his ear and the room explodes into noise, Hunk’s nervous babbling taking on a fever pitch.

“—and you ALWAYS do, so I didn’t think about—“ Hunk stammers, nonsensically. 

And suddenly Lance feels wide awake as the events of last night come back to him in a rush. His anxiety shoot up like a rocket as his blood runs cold, certain he’s been found out. His mind starts racing through all the ways he could have been busted. He wonders stupidly if it makes any sense for him to try to run. 

“What’s going on, Hunk?” Lance says seriously, grabbing Hunk’s face between his hands. Hunk looks absolutely miserable.

“Neither of us set an alarm last night!” Hunk wails.

Lance releases him and feels his heart start beating again. It looks like this morning is just a Hunk crisis, not a real one.  _ Thank god. _ Unaware of Lance’s relief, Hunk keeps going.

“We missed all of breakfast!” Hunk says, distraught, pacing next to Lance’s bed and nervously tugging at his hair in a way that makes tufts of it stand straight up, “If we don’t leave  _ right now _ we’re going to be late for class!” 

Lance pulls out his phone and reaches over the side of his bunk absently to untangle Hunk’s fingers out of his hair before his friend goes bald. 

8:57AM

_ And _ a text from “Crazy Aunt Sara”, which has Lance flushing hot, half remembering the weird sex dream starring Keith he’d just been woken up from. Whatever, he clicks his phone off and tosses it further down the bed, he’ll deal with that later.

He leans back, reaching his hands over his head glumly, stretching out his back. Okay, so he has class to get to in three minutes. That is not great _.  _

Lance jumps over the side of his bunk down to the floor, skipping the ladder entirely. He lands in a crouch next to the dirty uniform he took off the night before, which he wrinkles his nose at, before resigning himself and tugging it on. 

This is not going to be Lance’s day.

 

———

 

When he blows into his avionics lecture only seventeen minutes later, Lance is totally out of breath. The whole class stops to stare at him, including the professor, which is just about  _ super.  _ This is one of his classes that’s only open to students on the pilot track, and he knows every cadet in here is just praying for the day he slips up. He can actually see it in their eyes this morning.

Lance squares his shoulders from where he’s standing in the doorway, fakes a smirk and confidently swaggers to the back row of seats. Hopefully he’s succeeding in covering up the  _ burning _ discomfort and humiliation he feels, being caught slipping like this. He grinds his teeth and literally wills the heat from his face. He hates the thought of any of his classmates seeing him falter.

The lecturer raises her eyebrows, looking painfully annoyed. It never seems to matter how well Lance does in all his classes, none of his instructors ever seem to like him. 

“Nice of you to finally show up, McClain,” The professor says, dryly. 

“You know I’d never keep the prettiest girl at the Garrison waiting, Professor,” Lance calls back with a shit-eating grin, casually, slouching down to lounge in his seat laying it on as thick as he dares, “I’m sorry if you were worried.” 

Lance hears muffled laughter from his fellow cadets, and watches his instructor chew the insides of her cheeks. She’s probably the same age as his abuela, and when he’s running his mouth she looks like she’d love to throw a sandal at him like his abuela too. 

He throws her a wink and a cheesy grin. Her eye twitches. 

It takes until about half-way through the lecture for his classmates to stop curiously looking back at him, no doubt trying to figure out what to tell their friends about why Lance McClain rolled into avionics super late looking like he just rolled out of bed and smelling like total ass. Lance just takes notes and pointedly pretends not to notice the staring. 

When he finally feels satisfied that enough people have lost interest, he pulls out his phone to check the text Keith sent him. He’s kind of surprised to hear from Keith, to be honest. He’d thought that after last night, they’d be done. 

Lance reads the text with a roll of his eyes. Someday, he thinks, Keith is going to send him a text message that isn’t unnecessarily cryptic. And when that day comes, Lance is going to buy him a sheet cake and a Costco box of party hats so they can celebrate. 

In the meantime, though, Lance is going to have to keep digging like a goddamn archaeologist if he wants to make any sense of Keith at all.

Keith starts typing right away. Lance wonders if the guy is permanently attached to his phone.

Lance stares, stunned at Keith’s texts and thinks,  _ oh.  _ He pushes down the bristle of anger at the beginning of the text and slaps on his critical thinking hat.

If the Garrison’s official public position on Kerberos is the same as their private briefings, would that mean it’s  _ true _ ? Ever since Lance heard Keith out that night in his scary serial killer shack, it had honestly never occurred to him that Keith wouldn’t find exactly what he was looking for after just a little bit of law breaking.

Lance doesn’t really know what to say now, so he lets it sit for a few minutes, but he knows he has to say  _ something _ . Keith reached out because he really needs a friend right now, and whether or not he likes it, Lance is Keith’s friend. You just can’t commit major felonies with someone without bonding with them a little bit.

Lance sends his texts and doesn’t have to any time at all for a response from Keith. He can feel Keith’s need to desperately cling to hope, and it hurts his heart. If there’s any peace to be found here, Lance is gonna help Keith find it.

Keith is really tugging at Lance’s heart strings here. He doesn’t know if it’s the serious bonding experience the two of them shared or the weird dream he had last night, but turns out he’s really in it now. Turns out Lance really does just care about Keith’s wellbeing.

That’s so  _ sad _ . Lance feels his heart break at the same time he feels a vicious need to right this for Keith. He deserves closure in one way or another and Lance will be damned if he doesn’t try to help him find it.

This time, Keith takes much longer than usual to reply.

“— _ McClain _ !” 

Lance startles guiltily, looking up into the pinched, unimpressed face of his avionics professor, awkwardly slipping his phone into his pocket. 

“Save the socializing for outside of class, McClain,” she barks, “I promise, whatever your young lady wants will keep for another twenty-five minutes!” 

Lance leans forward and grins, putting both of his elbows on his desk and resting his face in his hands, the picture of teenaged boy innocence. 

“Aw, don’t be jealous, Professor,” He laughs, “You know I only have eyes for you.” 

 

-

 

Lance is walking over to the gym a few hours later when the next text from Keith comes.  

Lance snorts fondly and continues walking, typing out his reply.

The three dots next to Keith’s name go from typing to not typing to typing again. Lance snorts again when he sees the change. 

Lance actually stops walking and stares at the photos in absolute bafflement, pinching his fingers to zoom in. He has absolutely no idea what any of this means, but like, it’s crazy if true. It’s definitely a similar ship design as the one in the picture near Kerberos. There’s definitely something here.

Keith’s response comes fast and takes Lance by surprise even though it totally shouldn’t

A startled laugh bursts from Lance involuntarily, and he shakes his head in disbelief. Did Keith not remember anything about last night?

Lance puts his phone away smiling to himself, still shaking his head. It’s gonna be a trip having a friend who’s such a complete immutable dumbass.

He wonders a little if this is how Hunk feels, about being friends with Lance. 

 

-

 

Lance almost falls off the treadmill in the middle of his workout when Keith’s next text comes through about 20 minutes later.

 

-

 

Lance is in a linear algebra review session struggling over matrices when his phone starts buzzing in his pocket like crazy. The girl sitting to his right looks over at him, curiously, so he smiles apologetically at her, miming a shrug. She blushes and looks away and Lance has a moment where he thinks, hey, she’s kind of cute. He wonders if he should try talking to her sometime.

He’s still vaguely trying to remember if he knows her name as he pulls out his phone to see whatever it is that Keith needs.

Lance wrinkles his brow and looks closely at the pictures Keith’s sending him. He isn’t sure if he would have picked up on the changes Keith’s pointing out, but he can see how they might seem a little suspicious. 

He isn’t totally sure why Keith’s texting  _ him _ about this, because, like, what’s Lance going to do about some falsified official documents? Katie must still be too upset about him snooping in her room to want to talk to him. 

If it’s just attention Keith needs, that’s no problem. Let no one ever say that Lance is not a great friend. He’ll hype Keith up like nobody’s business. 

Keith seems confused when he responds, quickly as ever. Lance rolls his eyes. Keith has the emotional awareness of a hard boiled egg. 

Lance puts away his phone reluctantly to get back to trying to get all the finite-dimensional bullshit straight in his head before the exam. He sees his face reflected in the blank screen of his phone and realizes belatedly that he’s been smiling.

He turns to the girl next to him again, still smiling, to maybe get her name or strike up a conversation, but she looks down at her datapad the second he tries to meet her eyes. She looks kind of disappointed, and pretty closed off, so he just shrugs and thinks better of bothering her. 

 

-

 

At dinner, Lance sees Katie alone at their usual table and nearly trips over his feet in his haste to make his way over. He wants to ask her about all the texts he got from Keith before Hunk gets here. 

“Katie,” Lance starts, setting his tray down next to her and flopping down in his seat. Katie Holt jerks her head up in a start.

“Call me Pidge, Jesus Christ, what if someone heard you?” she interrupts with an urgent hiss, looking around behind her wildly to check for anyone who might have overheard. Satisfied that they’re not drawing any unwanted attention, she turns back to him and huddles in closer, “ _ What? _ ” 

“Uh, sure. Okay, Pidge,” Lance says, shaking his head and pulling out his phone, “Whatever. Has Keith been texting you too? Because look at this. The dude’s been blowing up my phone all day.”

Pidge nods absently and takes the phone from Lance, scrolling up through his messages. Lance leans over her shoulder to read through them too. 

Suddenly they’re interrupted by a crash of a cafeteria tray being dropped onto the table. Pidge pulls Lance’s phone to her chest as they both look up, startled, to see Hunk’s face staring befuddled at them from across the table. 

“Okay,” Hunk says, in a voice that falls just on the confused side of accusing, “What’s going on with you two?” His eyes flick back and forth between the two of them, searching for answers. 

Lance’s mouth starts moving before either one of them can recover from the shock. It’s a gift.

“What are you talking about?” He asks, stupidly. Hunk is not buying it.

“Last night you guys apparently hung out, and now  _ you,”  _ He says, gesturing his whole hand at Pidge, “Just willingly looked at something on Lance’s phone without telling him to go fuck himself. What’s going on?” 

Pidge seems to shake herself out of her stupor and looks down and then to the side, before casually shrugging her little shoulders and switching off Lance’s phone 

“It’s no big deal,” she says, nonchalantly pushing her glasses further up her nose and passing Lance his phone back, “Lance just finally came out to me last night.”

Lance and Hunk both gape at Pidge in unison.

“He  _ what?”  _ Hunk gasps.

_ “Pidge!”  _ Lance screams. 

Pidge looks startled, swinging her head around to look wide-eyed at Lance.

“Wait,” she says, sounding a little horrified “Hunk didn’t know  _ at all?” _

“Why would you tell  _ him _ before  _ me? _ ” Hunk demands, sounding hurt. 

Lance looks between the two, opening and closing his mouth helplessly, caught between complete and utter betrayal and his intense need to do damage control.

“It isn’t like that!” He gasps, his good-friend-instincts winning out in the end. He turns imploringly to Hunk with his hands held out peaceably, reaching towards his friend. 

Hunk’s eyes get wide. 

“Wait— it isn’t— you two aren’t—  _ Lance _ , I’m pretty sure that’s illegal!” He yells, looking between the two of them scandalized, backing away a half step, his voice going up at the end in panic. 

Lance jumps up out of his seat, waving his arms wildly.

“No!” He yells, scandalized, recoiling a little at the thought before reaching out for Hunk again, “God, no it’s nothing like that. And I  _ was _ going to tell you first. He just kind of...found out.”

Lance trails off, helplessly looking over to Pidge, unsure how he’s going explain this.

“I accidentally saw him with his boyfriend.” Pidge says, helpfully, with another shrug of her shoulders. 

Both Lance and Hunk’s eyes bulge out of their heads.

“ _ BOYFRIEND?!”  _ Hunk roars, rearing back again.

“Goddammit!” Lance yells, swinging around to glare at the girl in question, “Not helping, Pidge!”

“He’s not my  _ boyfriend _ ,” Lance says in a gentler desperate voice, turning back to reach pleading towards one of Hunk’s arms, “He’s just a....guy I’ve been talking to for a little bit.” 

Hunk blinks at him, looking caught between hurt and overwhelmed. 

“And does this guy have a name?” Hunk asks, still sounding unsteady, raising his eyebrows in question. 

Lance blinks in surprise and starts looking around a little, not totally sure what to do. This is not how he pictured coming out to Hunk would go at all. He wasn’t prepared to do this today. He has half of a long and emotional speech planned out in the back of his mind for this specific occasion, but it’s of no use here.

“Keith.” Pidge says, apparently interpreting Lance’s silence as an invitation to jump in again and make things worse. 

“Keith?!” Hunk says, stumbling back a few more steps and looking dismayed, “Like  _ Keith  _ Keith?”

“Wait,” Lance yelps, reaching for Hunk again to try to stop his retreat. He tries lunging forward, but the table blocks his way, knocking his hips harshly into it and causing him to bend at the waist, “Let me explain!”

Hunk just shakes his head and continues backing up, looking distraught.

“Explain what, why you apparently don’t trust me at all?” he hisses, sounding hurt, his eyes are welling up and shining a bit and Lance feels like the worst person alive, “I’m supposed to be your best friend, Lance, what the fuck? Are you serious? I’m- I’m out of here.”  

Hunk backs away for a few more steps before just turning and fleeing out of the mess hall. For a few seconds after his retreat, Lance still just look on in shock, standing frozen with his hands still extended.

Then he sinks back down onto the bench and cradles his head in his hands.

“Uh, so,” Pidge starts, sounding incredibly awkward.

“Fuck. You. Pidge.” Lance groans, without looking up. 

“Okay, so he knew Keith,” Pidge says, mostly to herself, “How was I supposed to know?”

Lance just groans some more. 

 

——————-

 

About half an hour later, Lance stands outside the door of the dorm room he’s shared with Hunk for the past two years, holding two slices of pizza inside a clamshell made of paper plates, unsure what to do with himself. All of their teasing and banter aside, Lance and Hunk have never seriously fought before. The sticky uncomfortable sense of guilt he has for being the one to fuck up that streak can’t really be overstated. Lance isn’t totally sure how to proceed. 

He settles on knocking.

“ _ What?”  _ he hears Hunk’s voice call sullenly through the door, after a second. Lance heaves in a sigh. 

“It’s me,” he says gently, leaning to push his face up against the door, “Can I come in?” 

_ “No.” _ he hears Hunk’s voice say petulantly. Lance just closes his eyes and sighs again, before punching in his door code.

Lance stands in the doorway, and looks in, still unsure. Hunk is curled up in his bed, facing away from Lance. 

“Hey,” Lance says, uncertainty, holding up his pizza, unsure, “I brought you pizza. You didn’t get to eat earlier.” 

“I’m not hungry.” Hunk says, shortly.

“Oh.” Lance exhales a slow breath from his nose, and sets the pizza on his desk, approaching Hunk’s bed slowly.

“Look, Hunk,” Lance says, miserably, sitting down on the edge of the bed near Hunk’s pillow and winding his fingers together. He faces away from his friend and resolutely stares at the wall, trying not to cry, “I’m really sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“I just don’t get why.” Hunk says, sitting up after a moment, his voice small. 

Lance can see out of the corner of his eye that his hair is all mussed and his eyes are a little red and puffy. It makes Lance feel like a real horse’s ass.

“I wanted to,” Lance says, leaning forward to rest his head in his hands, “I would have. It’s just hard, with you being straight—” 

Lance hears the plastic mattress shifting around and sees Hunk settling to sit next to him out of the corner of his eye.

“Yeah, barely,” Hunk huffs, sounding offended, “That sucks. I’m like, first-generation straight. Why wouldn’t you trust you could come out to me?” 

Lance closes his eyes tightly and runs his hands nervously through his hair. 

“I know that,” he says, weakly, huffing out a pained, self-deprecating laugh, “It’s just, this is all really new for me. I’m not good at talking about it yet. I’m honestly still sort of sorting through my own thoughts about it,” Lance shakes his head before pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes and clenching his jaw against the heat of the tears that are incoming. He hears the bed squeak again as Hunk shifts around more, and he wills himself to continue, “Plus I wanted to try dating boys outside of school. I wasn’t sure if you were gonna understand that.”

“Boys like Keith Kogane?” Hunk says, words coming out a little garbled around a mouth full of pizza. 

Lance opens his eyes and looks at Hunk to see his friend giving him a small teasing smile. A small hysterical giggle bubbles involuntarily out of Lance’s throat, he’s overwhelmed with sudden relief. He has to forcibly blink back the tears in his eyes a few time before he can smile.

“Ugh, I guess,” Lance laughs, covering his eyes again, embarrassed, “Yeah. Boys like Keith.”

They’re both quiet for a moment, with only the sounds of Hunk’s chewing breaking the silence.

“I guess that makes sense,” Hunk says after a minute, his voice pleasant and contemplative, “I mean, you definitely could have told me, but I guess I see why you didn’t.”

“I’m still sorry.” Lance says seriously, letting his shoulders relax.

Hunk shifts back over on the bed to bump Lance companionably with his shoulder. 

“Eh, don’t be. I’m over it.” He says lightly, finishing off the crust of the second piece of pizza and putting the greasy plates onto the floor. When he sits back up, Lance slumps against his shoulder and lightly presses the backs of their hands together.

“You’re the best.” Lance mutters, smiling, grateful to  whatever power is out there that gave him a best friend like Hunk. Hunk just snorts.

“I know,” Hunk laughs, resting his cheek on Lance’s hair, “So, tell me more about you and Keith?”

Lance pops up again, bashing his skull against Hunk’s ear in his haste, and makes a sound like a fire truck siren through his closed mouth. Hunk smirks at him knowingly, rubbing the side of his face absently and looking  _ terribly _ pleased with himself.

“ _ Ugh _ , there’s nothing to tell!” Lance yelps, waving his hands around wildly for emphasis, feeling his face flush despite himself, “At all! Plus, I’m talking to other guys too, ya know? Guys that are like,  _ actually _ hot. And aren’t desert gremlins with bad hair.”

Hunk rolls his eyes into the back of his head and tries patting Lance patronizingly on his cheek. Lance swats his hand away with a huff, which has Hunk guffawing loudly.

“Oh,” Hunk laughs, wiggling his eyebrows up and down suggestively, to Lance’s total dismay, “So we’re just going to ignore the big ass crush you’ve had on him for the last two years, then?”

Lance is now making the fire truck siren sound with his mouth open, and he tackles Hunk back onto the bed. Hunk keeps laughing at him.

 

———

 

—---

 

Lance stands sweating nervously in front of the door to Pidge’s dorm for the second night in a row. Before he raises his hand to knock, he turns to study Hunk, who is standing with both of his hands in his pockets, smiling blithely back at him.

Lance drops his hand and turns to his friend, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. Lance intimately knows this look, and coupled with the circumstances of this meeting, it leaves him with a foreboding feeling that is undoubtedly a precursor to extreme embarrassment by Hunk’s hands.

“You have to promise not to say anything weird to him.” Lance says, jabbing one finger into Hunk’s chest.

“I promise not to embarrass you in front of your boyfriend.” Hunk chuckles, rolling his eyes, using one of his hands to gently push Lance’s finger away from his person. 

“He isn’t—“ Lance seethes, whirling to face Hunk fully, but Hunk interrupts him with a laugh. 

“He isn’t your boyfriend,” He says, putting both hands on Lance’s shoulders to spin him back around to face the door, “I know, you’ve said. In all seriousness, I just want to say hi. It’s been, what, like a year since he left?” 

“Got expelled.” Lance grumbles, mostly to himself, as he knocks on the door. 

Pidge opens the door immediately, poking her head out to look up and down the hall suspiciously before stepping out, dragging Keith with her, and abruptly shutting the door behind the two of them. 

Keith looks a little confused, flicking his focus back and forth between Lance and Hunk awkwardly for a moment before settling on an awkward wave. 

It makes Lance smile.  _ What a dork.  _

“Hey Keith,” Lance says, stepping forward, “Uh, this is my best friend Hunk. He wanted to say hi before you head out.” 

Lance pats Hunk on the back. Hunk doesn’t know this, but they actually don’t have time to just stand around gawking at each other. Lance needs him to make this fast. 

“Hey Keith,” Hunk says, extending a large hand to shake after Lance’s pat propels him forward, “Long time no see.”

“Oh,” Keith says, sounding surprised before shaking Hunk’s hand with a small uncertain frown, looking over to Lance as if for help, “Hey, Hunk. How’s, uh, engineering..?”

Lance raises his eyebrows at Keith, crossing his arms, and has to actively bite down on the growing annoyance. Oh, so Keith can remember Hunk from the Garrison, but not Lance? Interesting. 

A wrinkle appears between Keith’s eyebrows as he gauges Lance’s reaction. He takes his hand back and looks back towards Hunk, who is talking again, with a look on his face that might, for Keith, count as sheepish. 

“Engineering, yeah,” Hunk says enthusiastically, unaware of the unspoken conversation happening over his head, “Good memory! It’s good!”

Keith still looks a bit like a deer in headlights, clearly unsure what is supposed to come next in a normal-ass conversation. Any other time, Lance might have jumped in and saved him, but tonight he’s not feeling particularly charitable. 

“Anyway, man, how’ve you been?” Hunk asks, friendly, his good nature rescuing Keith from his own awkwardness, “What have you been up to?”

“Uh,” Keith looks again to Lance for help. Lance arches one eyebrow, as if to say  _ and what about it? _ Keith looks away, nostrils flaring slightly, to focus back on Hunk, “Good? Just uh, fixing up my dad’s old place and,” Keith hesitates a little before finishing, unsure, “Talking to Lance?”

Hunk nudges Lance in a way that is not at all subtle, which would be absolutely humiliating if Keith was a normal guy with any conception of social norms. Lance tries stomping on Hunks foot anyway, just on principle.

“Oh, Lance is the best, right?” Hunk grins at Keith, pulling his foot out of Lance’s path and throwing his friend a teasing wink.

Keith still looks horribly confused, but his face is turning red, and it looks like not understanding is starting to frustrate him. Okay, Lance thinks, time to go.

“Okay well,” Lance interrupts, lunging forward to grab Keith’s arm before whirling on Hunk, quirking his hip and glaring at his meddling friend, “ _ Lance _ needs to get Keith out of here right now before he gets found, I get expelled, and we  _ both _ get arrested!”

“Wait, what?” Hunk says, startled, and instantly looking on the verge of a freak out, “Expelled?!”

Pidge finally jumps in, and puts a hand on Hunk’s arm, steering him away.

“Yeah, expelled and arrested for being horny on main,” she says, shaking her head, “Tragic. C’mon, let’s let them say goodbye in private.”

“Uh, okay,” Hunk says, looking down at her confused but letting himself be lead away, “Bye, Keith!” He calls, waving over his shoulder. 

Keith waves back at him, looking bemused.

Lance waits until Hunk and Pidge disappear down the hallway before turning to glare at Keith. 

“So you can remember Hunk, but but not me?” He demands, eyes narrowing at Keith. 

Keith looks startled, but still a little annoyed. 

“Lance,” He starts, “Don’t be mad.” 

“Who’s mad!” Lance spits, marching ahead with his nose in the air for Keith to follow after him, mad, “No one’s mad! I don’t know her!”

**Author's Note:**

> come talk to me on tumblr! wolfdog-blue.tumblr.com


End file.
